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Matte Painting – TimeLine

The Early Years 1902 - Georges Méliès films A Trip to the Moon, using actors in front of painted backdrops to create a fanciful journey. 1903 - Edwin S. Porter directs The Great Train Robbery. Porter creates some of the first…
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Matte Painting – Sudden Impact

Titanic Bram Stoker's Dracula Casino "The invading army was the technical people who built the machines. At first we [artists] were all confused traditional matte painting and digital was a head-on collision. There was lots of…
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Matte Painting – The Force

Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back Dune The Love Bug "What's great about matte painting is you get to control a little bit of the movie. Sure, you've got everybody telling you how to do it, but you get to bring across some narration,…
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Matte Painting – Way of the Artist

Mame Colossus: The Forbin Project "Al Whitlock taught me things mostly by osmosis. It was about being around him, seeing him. Al didn't believe in drawing out a shot. It was about the energy of the moment when he was painting.…
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Matte Painting – Big Picture

The Great Race Ben-Hur It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World "It was always effective, when you went to the big films in those days, that people actually were so moved by the impact of these tremendous big screen cataclysms and effects……
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Matte Painting – To War and Back

Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo Since You Went Away "We had a sign over our barracks: 'Is This Trip Really Necessary?'"Lou Lichtenfield, matte artist and WW II B-17 bomber pilot United States participation in World War II with war…
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Matte Painting – Dream Factories

Spellbound Citizen Kane Forgive me if I say that one of the many fields in which the Selznick International pictures were way ahead of the rest of the business was in their enormous use of matte shots, optical effects.When Gone…
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Matte Painting – Wonderful Magic

The Thief of Bagdad Wizard of Oz For a long time [in the post-studio era] Hollywood seemed to forget the wonderful magic that you can create, like the scenes we did in Alexander Korda's The Thief of Bagdad…. Alex Korda would…
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The-Invisible-art-Matte-Painting-Introduction

"The fact that you can get a little bit of paint and with film, create an incredible scene don't you think that's quite a beautiful equation?"- Albert Whitlock, matte painter Going to the movies has been likened to a shared dream,…